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Dessert

Spice Cookies

A sweet cookie dough flavored with brown sugar, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, lemon, almonds, citron, and vanilla, baked and iced with stiff egg white icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Spice Cookies

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spice Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix brown sugar, cloves, egg yolks, allspice, egg whites, cinnamon, lemon rind and juice, almonds, vanilla, citron, and salt.

  3. Add flour gradually until the mixture is stiff.

  4. Spread the dough in a buttered pan.

Bake and ice

  1. Bake in the preheated oven until done.

  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  3. Gradually add sugar to the beaten egg whites to make a stiff icing.

  4. Spread the icing over the cookies while they are still hot.

  5. Cut the cookies while hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Cinnamon + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the dough together.
Egg whites
Whipped whites give the icing a stiff, airy structure.
Flour
Builds the structure of the stiff dough as it bakes.
Almonds
Add crunch and texture to the cookies.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a mild caramel flavor.
Ground cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and spice flavor.

The step that matters

Spread the icing while the cookies are still hot. Icing spreads more evenly over a warm surface, and cookies firm up as they cool, so cutting them while hot keeps them from cracking and makes the pieces cleaner.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, clove, egg, allspice, cinnamon, almond, vanilla):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, egg, allspice, cinnamon, almond, vanilla. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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